


For You, I Watch

by FBIEpidemic



Category: Elementary (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-19
Updated: 2018-10-19
Packaged: 2019-08-04 15:12:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16349072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FBIEpidemic/pseuds/FBIEpidemic
Summary: Joan watches Sherlock sleep and she knows it's a huge invasion of privacy but she has to. She has to know that in the morning he'll be hovering over her bed and calling her name to lure her from her comforter with food and an outfit.





	For You, I Watch

**Author's Note:**

> I have never written an Elementry fanfic before(?) so I mean, go easy. Yeah?

She watches him sleep. 

It’s invasion of the privacy that she preaches so often about. 

Yet she stands over him and watches. She has to be here. She wants to be here. 

She watches the rise of his chest, counts the moments that it staggers before his breath is gone from his lungs in a soft ‘whoosh’ of air. Between the breathes she lets the bitter taste of espresso wash away her tea. She’s two cups in and she knows it’s going to be a long night. 

Some nights, she finds him curled on the couch. Somehow he’s able to contort his five feet and eleven inches into a weird pretzel that fits on the armchair. The power of observation, engraved into her mind by his own doing, catches the flakes of work all over his hands and the exhaustion written in the corners of his eyes. 

When he falls asleep on the floor, she curls her body in a chair and watches. 

In these moments, he is the most at peace she ever gets to see him. He does not need to look over his ‘community’.

She is a member of his community. A gated community with studios background checks when, in the end, they all live in the same houses as ex-cons and heroin addicts. Slowly, over time and late night watches, they are granted their own houses. No longer condemned to live with the damned but gifted a place in his life where she is of importance.

In his sleep, he is not reckless and he is peaceful.

There are nights when she finds him in the oddest places. 

In his chair, flipped upside down with his hips hardly hanging onto the seat and his body slid onto the floor so that his headrest in a puddle of his clothes from where his body has pushed it up to his shoulders. On the stairs, often times bleeding from some area of his body, slumped against the wall and snoring with no care in the world. In the bathtub, his head tilted against the tiles. His body is not wet, he did not bathe, he just likes to sit in the tub.

Wherever he falls asleep, she is there too. 

When she finds him half-clothed in his armchair, she settles into the middle of the madness of crime photos he has spread in their living room. She watches them both with a careful eye and with equal interest. They are both problems which she seeks the answer to.

When she finds him in the bathtub she curls her lithe body around herself until she seats in a neat pretzel perched atop the toilet lid. She watches the way his eyes dart under his eyelashes and before the hour comes she’ll drop a bottle of shampoo on the floor and be gone before he can startle.

When she finds him on the stairs, she halls him up. Together they make it back to his room, where his voice fills her ears with whatever information she’s found on his newest mission. She patches up his holes and shoves him into bed. Often, his eyes are already closed before she can tug a blanket over his body.

She likes it best when he falls asleep on the floor. He appears the most peaceful when he’s curled up on the hardwood, pictures of the slain all around him. In those moments, she can sit down beside him and rub his arm or back. Any fits that he may stir up are fought down when she rubs at his back. 

In the morning, when she’s groggy and unenthusiastic about getting up, she needs him to be there. 

She needs to hear his voice determined and on the break of excitement as he pulls her from consciousness. 

She stays up, she watches, so that he is there and it’s worth it.


End file.
